


Meanwhile, He Waits

by counterheist



Category: Hetalia: Axis Powers
Genre: Fluff, M/M, drunken antics, spain is not the crayon with the best memory
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-22
Updated: 2011-12-22
Packaged: 2017-11-28 16:51:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,829
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/676677
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/counterheist/pseuds/counterheist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Romano leaves a note for Spain one day: “I’m waiting for you at our place.” Cue Spain running around, trying to remember where exactly that is.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Meanwhile, He Waits

**Author's Note:**

> Written in February or March for a Spamano project that didn’t quite get off the ground. If another one of those rolls around I’ll write something fresh for it. In the meantime, enjoy.

Spain woke to birdsong, sunshine, and a love letter. It wasn’t a particularly fancy love letter, no lace framed the edges. The paper itself looked as though it had been torn from the corner of an expense report, and judging from the disorder in the scrawled words, the message had only taken a few seconds to write. That didn’t matter, because a love letter was a love letter, and as soon as Spain felt it tickling his nose ( _it had been left on his face, to destroy any possibility he wouldn’t notice it_ ), he knew what the scrap of paper meant.

_‘Is my ceiling peeling?’_

Or maybe he didn’t.

_‘It doesn’t feel like wallpaper… but why would wallpaper be on the ceiling anyway? A ceiling isn’t a wall. Do I have wallpaper on my ceiling? Do I have wallpaper at all? Which bedroom is this?’_

The light sensation of the paper on the edge of his nose won out over interior design, and after a moment or two Spain opened his eyes. The crème ceiling above him reflected the hazy morning light. No paper, nothing except the rough print lying across his face and Spain wondered why he thought it had ever been anything other than a note. No matter. He disentangled his left hand from a blanket and grabbed the note. Hopefully it wasn’t about a meeting.

It wasn’t.

_I’m waiting for you._

Because Romano never wrote about meetings, not even when he wanted badly to complain about them. No, Romano always called when he needed to talk about meetings and work and sometimes alliances, although he really wasn’t supposed to be talking about those things alone with Spain anyway.

_At our place. Just show up._

But waiting and places sounded suspiciously like meetings and as Spain swung his legs over his bedside, he wondered what could be wrong. Had he slept through a forum? An agreement? Usually his aides called before that happened. Called and called, and drove out, and banged on the door, and found it open, and wasted a few minutes deliberating whether they should go in or not without express permission ( _even the ones who had known Spain for a decade or four, what a silly thing_ ). The anxious thoughts buzzing up from outside his window tended to wake Spain more than the knocking ever did.

All he could feel on his lawn were the content waves of not-quite-thought rolling off the grass. He hadn’t missed a meeting then.

But what could Romano want?

Spain scratched the back of his head and stumbled with bare feet over to his desk. He pushed the stray reports and correspondences away from the surface, and stretched out the note on the bare wood. The change of angle didn’t change the words on the page.

 _I’m waiting for you at our place. Just show up_.

Spain checked his calendar next. But nothing was circled there and none of the squares were annotated with statements like ‘ _don’t forget this time you bastard_ ’ or ‘ _if you leave me waiting at the restaurant again, so help me, I will punch you in Barcelona so hard you’ll never be able to get it up again_ ,’ the second of which had taken over March’s entire page.

Spain’s room didn’t look any more like a mess than it had when he’d gone to bed. If he’d missed something important, if he’d forgotten, then Romano must have forgotten too. Either that or Spain had forgotten something _really_ important and wherever he was, Romano was waiting in cold fury. …Hopefully not. It was too early in the day for an argument.

But why else would Romano go to the trouble of leaving Spain a note if it there hadn’t been a meeting or something else Spain had slept through? Maybe France would know. But Spain stopped himself before he could pick up his phone.

He wanted to figure this puzzle out for himself.

He wanted to figure Romano out for himself because Romano spent a lot of his time being puzzling and Spain spent a lot of their time together confused. When Spain had said as much, Romano had thrown a book at him. The book had missed, unsurprisingly. But even though Spain knew what that meant ( _“Romano, your aim still hasn’t improved?”_ ), he still didn’t know a lot about Romano and Romano’s inner workings and he wanted to change that.

After hundreds of years, Spain had barely made any progress at all, not that he could tell. And if Spain hadn’t figured Romano out, then France couldn’t have. Spain didn’t think even Veneziano had. The only nation who had managed to figure out Romano was Romano ( _maybe_ ).

Spain picked up his phone. If he wanted to know what Romano’s note meant, he had to go to the expert.

_RING_

“Spain?”

“That’s me!” Romano didn’t speak and after a few seconds of smiling at the wall, Spain realized that might have been because he had called Romano and not the other way around. “Did I forget something really important and now you’re passive aggressively punishing me?”

He waited.

“The fuck did you just say?”

As that wasn’t a real answer, if anything it was another vague dodge, Spain stayed silent.

Romano did not. “Stop being a moron, even though that’s difficult for you. Just get down here. _Now._ ”

He hung up before Spain could ask where ‘here’ was. In retrospect, Spain thought, he probably should have asked about that first. But he’d gotten a few answers in the very least. Romano hadn’t sounded angry on the other line.

Well.

Romano had sounded angry enough, but only the shade of anger that came when Spain called him when Romano didn’t feel like Spain should have. That tone came up a lot when Spain called, although why Romano wouldn’t want Spain thinking about him enough to want to hear Romano’s voice didn’t make any sense. Oh sure, Romano would shout that he didn’t give a fuck about the bread Spain was deciding between in the market, or the number of pigeons Spain could see in the fountain outside his office, or the color of Spain’s shoes.

Spain had figured out a long time before that Romano liked playing hard to get.

It worked.

“Our place… I wonder…”

_RING_

“What part of—?”

“If this isn’t a punishment then what is it?”

Romano huffed into the phone. “What do you think?”

Spain walked into his closet and began deliberating ties. “Is it something good?”

A quick, guilty “No.” followed.

That was as good as a ‘yes, definitely, something amazing.’ Spain allowed himself to hope. “Something for me?”

“No.”

Spain bit his lip to make sure he didn’t shout anything about cuteness on the phone; Romano was touchy about that. “All right!”

“Shut—”

This time, even though it was a little spiteful, Spain hung up first. So Romano had planned something not good, not for him. Spain couldn’t wait. All he had to do now was arrive and get romanced by the Not _Most_ Passionate, But Still High Up There On The List country in the world. If Romano put effort into anything, then he put it into assuring everyone else that he was better than them at romance. And food. Romano was adamant about those things ( _Spain thought it was cute, even though his people were obviously better at both_ ).

But before Spain could arrive, he had to figure out the riddle.

_Our place…_

Ignoring the ties, he threw on a shirt, the first he could find, and raced downstairs. He forewent breakfast, because if he was lucky ( _and he would be_ ) Romano might make him something sooner rather than later, and ran barefoot into the fields behind his house.

Even if Spain had changed houses frequently in all the time Romano had known him, he had always managed to have a garden behind them. The only redeeming quality about the sullen, lazy henchman from across the Mediterranean had been his love of Spain’s gardens. And his inheritance, but Spain didn’t think about that so often anymore.

Instead he chose to think of long off days of peace, when the wind and the sunshine and soil had transformed Romano’s insufferable attitude into wonder. Those days in the country, when he’d been able to ignore missives and court, had been Spain’s favorite memories for a long time.

_“Romano! Be careful with that.”_

_Spain’s words, too late, finished just as Romano slipped on a patch of mud, toppled over into the flowerbed, and soaked his dress with an entire pail of cold river water._

_“Y-you bastard,” some of the water on Romano’s face might not have been from the river, but Spain couldn’t tell, “why did you do that?!”_

_“Wha… Romano, I didn’t do anything. You fell over because you weren’t careful.” He frowned and kneeled. “We should probably head back now. Otherwise you’ll get sick again.”_

_“No!” Romano wobbled to his feet. His formerly almost, kind of, essentially clean apron looked as though he had managed to turn mud into a fabric. He stamped his foot on the ground and grabbed two bunches of flowers in his hands. A few stalks snapped. “I don’t want to!”_

Spain kept the tomatoes to his left and plunged into the rose garden. Romano had always hated leaving the gardens. Spain had always thought it was because Romano usually left the gardens cut up and itchy and bad tempered, and his little pride refused to let the servants see it. Romano had rolled his eyes at the explanation when Spain had given it to him as an adult, one night under the stars.

But Spain didn’t know what else could be the reason. He didn’t have much to go on, because once he left the dirty little nation in the hands of his servants, Spain often couldn’t return to the gardens for months. Empires could never remain idle.

“Romano?”

When he didn’t see a secret picnic set up among the flowers, Spain paused and shouted. Perhaps Romano was hiding.

But minutes passed, and after a search of the entire garden, Spain found nothing but blooms. Maybe, then, Romano had written about the tomatoes. If anything counted as ‘our place’ it had to be where the tomatoes grew, considering how much Spain and Romano both loved them. The fruit had brought them together through years and arguments and seas of distance.

_“I’m not saying I’m not mad at you anymore, because you’re a dick and you deserve everything I said, but here. Take it.”_

_“…didn’t this come from my house?”_

_“Yeah? So?! It came from my part of the garden, stupid, or can’t you even tell?”_

The tomato field held nothing but the plants that grew there.

Spain wondered if Romano would consider giving him a hint, if he called again, but his pride wouldn’t let him return to his home for his phone. Spain didn’t always quite know what was going on, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t if he tried. He would find Romano.

The next three places he tried were not as simple as the gardens, but still held strong places in Spain’s heart. Hopefully in Romano’s too.

There was the little restaurant in Valencia where Romano had allowed Spain to hold his hand in public for the first time.

_“I swear to God if you pretend this is something important I’ll break your fingers. So stop looking at me like that. Stop it!”_

The owner had given Spain something to eat for free, gladly, but had shaken his head when asked about Romano. He hadn’t been there in months.

Next had been Madrid, the city, because that was Spain’s heart. And Spain’s heart belonged to the both of them ( _figuratively, because Madrid the city was purely the territory of the Kingdom of Spain, and if Romano wanted to claim it like some sort of ring or symbol then Spain would have to repel him with military force and nobody wanted that_ ). Romano knew that too, even if he never said so.

Spain closed his eyes, and thought.

He opened them again in the middle of a quiet drawing room in the royal palace, in Madrid. His heartbeat resonated. But with the first breath he drew, Spain knew Romano wasn’t in the city. He could feel it. And he was at a loss. “Roma…”

But Romano took pride in his pride, and maybe by ‘our place’ he had meant the other heart they shared ( _but that Spain was only allowed to visit when he promised not to be such a fucking tourist, shit, stop staring at everything, you’re in the way_ ).

Spain couldn’t appear in Rome whenever he wanted to. But he could get through security really fast, by now, even in Fiumicino. He blinked and found himself in a bathroom stall. It smelled like detergent, and Spain shrugged off the annoyance of missing his target ( _…he’d been aiming for first class on the next plane to Rome_ ). He opened the stall door, and came face-to-face with a woman washing her hands ( _22, born in Yecla, went to school in Madrid, waiting for a plane to Brussels, favorite color yellow_ ).

“Good day!”

The girl waved absently in return, her eyes glazed over with something a little like patriotism, and a little like a defense mechanism. Spain winked at her before stepping lightly out of the women’s restroom. It was good that the only human in the room had been one of his citizens. Otherwise it would have been a little awkward.

Even more awkward than walking out of the ladies’ room in front of a large group of American tourists.

_RING_

Glad for the distraction, Spain smiled his brightest at the group before ducking away into a corner. To his surprise, his phone listed Romano ( _more accurately, it listed ‘Roma’s Special Line That’s Okay for Those Kinds of Calls’_ ) as the caller.

“Roma?”

“What the hell is taking you so long?”

Spain watched a plane land outside the large glass windows. “What do you mean? It takes a long time to get to you from me. If it didn’t, then I would visit you much more often than I do.”

Romano replied sharply and softly. “…you moron, where do you think you’re going?”

Sometimes what seemed like questions were really explosive accusations in disguise, so Spain tried to tread carefully. “…not Rome?” He’d gotten pretty good at it.

“Rome? You think you’re going to _Rome?_ ”

Unfortunately, Romano didn’t hear everything said around him when he got angry. Which was most of the time. “No?” Spain cleared his throat. “I mean, no. I’m not going to Rome, that’s completely wrong. I’m going to where you are. To our place.”

Something dropped on the other end of the line. It sounded like a heavy piece of metal against cool tiles. Knowing Romano, the source of the noise could have been a pan, but more likely was a knife. “You forgot.”

Shit. “No! No, I didn’t, I didn’t forget exactly. I… had things to do. In Madrid. You know how it is. With bosses. They always want you to check in, they always want reassurance that you’re not sick or about to do something stupid again with somebody who isn’t even a country, although I keep telling him that Prussia only tells Germany secrets he overhears if I don’t give him more beer than Germany promised him first, and—”

“If you’re not here in three minutes I’m leaving.”

He hung up, and Spain saw the last decade flash before his eyes, as fast as a speeding jet. It had taken a lot of effort to get Romano to calm down long enough to admit that he liked spending time with Spain. It had taken even longer to get him to admit that what they had together wasn’t so much international relationship building as it was a building relationship between two people who happened to be nations.

Spain had fallen below Romano’s expectations more than once already. Romano had definitely fallen below Spain’s. But a few days after each breakup, Spain had promised to himself that he would be more careful the next time. He wouldn’t give up.

He’d figure Romano out.

Spain sat on the recently swept floor inside his Madrid-Barajas airport, and thought.

Their place hadn’t been the gardens. It hadn’t been the fields. It wasn’t the restaurant, Spain’s house, Spain’s heart or Romano’s. It was somewhere Romano expected Spain could get to in a matter of minutes, although that didn’t say much because Romano expected the world of Spain.

But where could that be?

A minute passed. Spain tried to remember.

He thought of summers in Buñol.

“ _You bastard, if you think you’re hitting me with that—”_

_SPLAT_

_“You bastard!”_

_“It’s all in good fun,” he could barely stand from the laughter, and the slippery residue underfoot, “besides. You look good in red, Roma.”_

He remembered winters together in Genestosa.

_SPLAT_

_The snow dripped down the back of Romano’s neck. Spain watched it disappear underneath his scarf. “Holy shit, do you have a fetish for hitting me with things? Wet things? What is your problem?”_

_Spain decided that Romano’s problem, a cold neck, could easily be fixed with a warm pair of arms. “I could ask you the same thing.” He switched his movements to catch Romano’s flailing arms just above the elbows. A cold neck could be fixed by a warm face too._

He remembered a time, five years earlier, when they’d gotten amazingly drunk at a festival and had bought a little house together just outside Seville. Spain had woken up, without pants, in front of the kitchen fire. Romano had been outside, shirtless, in the hedges. They had agreed, as soon as they had been capable of speaking without groaning, to never tell anyone about anything, fuck why is it so bright in here?

Normally Spain might have refused, but he had been fairly certain that _technically_ nations weren’t supposed to own property inside other nations, he didn’t even know what that house stood for as both his and Romano’s names had been put on the deed. Spain hadn’t even told his boss about that house.

_That house._

Spain blinked as quickly as he could and before he knew it, reappeared in front of a roaring fire in the kitchen of a little house just outside Seville. “I’m here.”

“I can see that.” Romano stood across the room with his back to the fire.

“Romano,” Spain caught himself before he apologized. If he apologized outright then maybe the surprise Romano had for him really wouldn’t be good. It was better to change the subject. “I haven’t been here in a long time. Have you… did you clean up this morning?”

If he had, he’d done a good job of it. The sun peeking in through the windows glinted off polished furniture and spotless floors, and what Spain could see of the outside looked very trim.

“No. Some of your people were squatting here.”

Oh. “Where are they?” Spain couldn’t feel anyone else nearby.

Romano picked up a long knife and began chopping tomatoes by the sink. “I kicked them out.”

Spain frowned. Even if his citizens had trespassed, that didn’t mean they deserved poor treatment. “You shouldn’t have. This was their house.” Probably the only home they had to go back to.

“No,” Romano stabbed a nearby head of lettuce with a vengeance. “It’s _ours_.”

A door opened along a dusty corridor inside Spain’s mind, a corridor devoted to all things Romano ( _that was probably why it was so dusty, even thoughts of Romano were terrible at cleaning_ ). The room the door opened on to looked a lot like the kitchen Spain was sitting in, except it was filled to the brim with roses and hearts.

Spain stood from the floor, didn’t bother patting down his clothes, and grabbed Romano from behind. He trusted Roma not to jump, or elbow him, or stab him with the knife he’d retrieved from the lettuce. “It is.”

They stood in the sunlight, in their home.

_“Sir this is quite out of the ordinary.”_

_Spain pulled his wallet out of his back pocket. Or tried to; when he felt nothing but the fabric of his pants he snaked his arm around Romano’s waist and tried his back pockets instead. Spain found a wallet on his first try: when he pulled it out he recognized it as his own. …Roma was really something, how he always protected Spain’s things. “But. You. Y’said earlier the thing that you said that you had on the sign was the thing. You said. There were papers.”_

_Romano blinked angrily at the man. He didn’t bother saying anything because he couldn’t quite manage anything other than weepy exclamations of what a wonderful time he was having and how much he knew everyone hated him, and fuck he didn’t actually hate Spain, and he probably loved that ass more than he loved wine. And even if Romano was drunk, he wasn’t that drunk._

_“Sir, I don’t think you’re well, and,” the man paused when Spain shoved a wad of bills, and a clumsily filled out form, into his hands. “This is a lot of money.”_

_Spain winked at the intelligent observation._

_The man left shortly after, and wouldn’t remember the next day why he’d sold the house to a complete stranger in such an unorthodox way. He wouldn’t wonder at how legal the transaction had been. He would hum La marcha real at breakfast, but he had always loved his country._

_How Spain managed to unlock the front door was anyone’s guess, but why he didn’t manage to carry Romano across it was easy to figure out. Spain laughed when Romano shoved him past the threshold, even when the force of the motion toppled him to the ground. “Ours.”_

_“F-fuck. No. No. I’m not sweeping or anything. Sweeping. Cl-cleaning. Not. I’m not good at it, and everyone thinks I should be better at things and I should be better at things like everyone says and fuck I don’t need you why don’t you ever sweep?!”_

_Spain swept his leg under Romano’s feet, knocking him to the floor. “I just did.” He rolled himself closer to where Romano had fallen, because even Spain’s hazy mind knew Romano wasn’t going anywhere. “Hey.”_

_Romano didn’t say anything. Spain hoped he didn’t have a concussion. “Roma. You. Hey, shush.” Spain ran his hands a little more roughly than could be called comforting along Romano’s back, but his motor skills had never been the best after a few drinks. “Hush.”_

_“Fuck you.”_

_Spain smiled, “later,” and continued to rub Romano’s back. He could see the night sky through the open door, covered in clouds. But he knew the stars lay beyond them. “‘cause we can. Here. We can do anything. ‘S our place.”_

_“L-liar.” Romano drew in a deep, wet breath. Spain held him closer._

_“I promise.”_

**Author's Note:**

> The theme of the project was ‘passionate memories’, if I remember correctly, and I’m pretty sure I do, so this is what I came up with.


End file.
